I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Saturday, June 1, 2013

May junk drawer

Welcome to the junk drawer, part of a series of monthly posts in which I dump all the stuff that I couldn't develop into full blog posts this past month. Warning: it's a pile of really random stuff this month. ;-)

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The words "may not modify" come up five different times in EVE's End User License Agreement in respect to EVE's game play and code. Very specifically, the EULA says:

You may not copy (except as set forth above), distribute, rent, lease, loan, modify or create derivative works of, adapt, translate, perform, display, sublicense or transfer the Software or any documentation accompanying the Software.

And yeah, as I've said, I understand player discontent about the new launcher. But surely there is no better way to respond to it than to blatantly announce your intention to develop a third-party launcher for EVE Online... and then advertise that launcher on the EVE Online forums. Needless to say, this guy had CCP land on his face with both feet, and rightfully so.

Good call, what? And that's before you get into paranoia and conspiracy theories about feeding your user IDs and passwords for all your EVE Online accounts into a third-party launcher...

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Speaking of EVE-related application development, apps like this are pretty much why CCP was messing around with that $99 commercial license fee thing. I totally respect EVE application developers. Roc Wieler (once part of the Capsuleer team in addition to being a blogger) and Marcel Devereux (developer of Aura) are two of my favorite people who play EVE. And I am a user of EVEmon and EFT and a half dozen other EVE apps. I totally respect the hard work they put into their creations and fully support them being paid for their efforts if CCP could find a fair way for this to happen.

But sometimes you get a guy who builds an EVE app almost completely on the labor of others... and that same app costs CCP money in terms of increased server utilization, database calls, API support, and the like.

Should that person then be allowed to charge for their application and for their limited value-add? It's a tricky call.

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Sooner or later, I should write a full blog post about the romance gamers in general and EVE players in particular have with achievements. Is there anyone out there reading that hasn't tried to hit some achievement in some game that was probably meaningless to everyone in the universe except you? ;-)

Hell, lots of people play EVE for no other reason than to rack up achievements, certificates, a nice kill-death ratio, or a nice ISK efficiency, or whatever.

And with that in mind, I present a sort of to-do guide on how to do a great video game stats page. It's the newest version of the World of Tanks stats page, and it's pretty freakin' awesome. Here's an example. It's more or less how a MMO stats page should be done, at least if you think EVE is primarily a PvP MMO (and I'm not saying I do).

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Speaking of achievements, here's one that probably nobody in the world cares about except me. Don't say you weren't warned. If:

you have EVE set to a 1920x1080 (or taller) screen resolution; and,

you're sitting in Jita 4-4 or another Caldari station in Hangar view; and,

you have ship spinning turned on (as I now do after ages of having it turned off); and,

you have the Station Services window either minimized or somewhere other than the upper right hand corner of the screen; then,

you will have a dark grey box on a light grey background in the upper right corner of your screen that is both the same dark shade used for Steam achievements and moves very slightly every few seconds.

The human eye is drawn to movement and as a result, I keep seeing that dark box move out of the corner of my eye and then looking at that corner of the screen to see what Steam achievement I've just unlocked. "Immobile in Jita for the 20th consecutive hour", probably...

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Having started playing EVE in 2008 or so, I completely missed this EVE video, which is apparently a classic of the genre. So here it is in case you missed it too, because it really is very funny. Go watch it. It's worth your time. It's full of muted profanity and homicidal mania. Needless to say, this sort of documented rant is also against the TOS...

The character in question was presumably bio-massed sometime after this video was released.

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Another quick proof that DUSTies are growing up fast. In addition to dealing with corp theft, now they're also having to deal with spies and the meta-game...

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And finally, this just made me laugh. Sometimes you see a huuuuuuuge pile of ice-mining ships all in close proximity to each other in a 0.5 high-sec system somewhere. So you get some friends together, fit up some smart-bombing battleships, slip them into the system because their sec status hasn't quite hit -5.0 yet. Then you set up a situation where you can warp your smart-bombing battleships into the mass of ice-miners and get yourself dozens and dozens of ganks. As I've said, I'm sympathetic to the needs of this game-play style.

But it also means I get to laugh at you if your smart-bombing battleships get no kills whatsoever because you didn't bring quite enough of them. ;-) Well, OK technically, they all killed each other...

This one's courtesy of my old friends in ExodusDOT alliance, who I hugely respect. But every once in a while, they've been known to kick their own asses, hee.

As for the smart-bombing battleships: several ice harvesting operations that I've been involved with lately have had swarms of Garde IIs deployed by the ice harvesting ships, assisting the fast-locking destroyer, tornado or whatever.

The ISKm3 is providing a service that is actually useful: EVE-Central doesn't give you that information, you have to dig through the market reports to get it. By deprecating it as "built on the labours of others" you are basically stating that there is no value-add in bringing the important information to the top.

People pay generous salaries for personal assistants who do this kind of thing: filter incoming mail, handle phone calls, book appointments, manage the diary, remind you about meetings and important dates, etc.

This app adds value. If CCP is happy with people using the freemium model, I can see a way for Capsuleer to be relaunched as a freemium app: free for one account, upgrade to the premium version for multiple accounts.

But let's see what happens with ISKm3. Will it be removed at CCP's request?

In the meantime, I'll continue using my existing spreadsheet which tells me not only which ore is worth the most ISK/m3 in my current region, but what the compression ratios are for various blueprints and which ones let me get some mineral elsewhere for the lowest compression cost.

The player made launcher is a godsend for Linux users. Yes, I know, unsupported platform is unsupported and if I run Linux I have to expect not being able to play games, but Eve runs fine under wine except for Eve-Voice and CQ. The new launcher, however, does not. Fortunately I can read and understand Python code, so I could make an informed decision if I trust the launcher code.

What did happen to the Programmer of the launcher? I hope he didn't get banned.

I'd imagine the majority of people who use Linux have some understanding of programming and encryption techniques.

It uses AES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard), and the launcher itself is open source so that you can check for yourself how trustworthy the code is. Then, if you're happy with it, compile it.

To prove the point it's safe, not reading the EULA is something a lot of people do, but posting a password logging, _open source_ application, ON THE !!E-ONLINE!! forums? That would be pretty dumb.

I assume nothing really happened to that guy. The thread was locked on the 25th of May. The last update to the launcher was on the 5th of June (https://github.com/shish/eve-mlp/tree/develop). It'd be pretty dumb to update a launcher to a game that you were banned from. Even dumber to update the aforementioned launcher that got you the ban in the first place.

I haven't used it, but from the screenshots and the description, it looks pretty swish. A lot more substance and a lot less fluff than CCP's ~attempt~ anyway.

In Soviet EVE all launchers are in Russian!!! Can CCCP deny there isn't still a launcher problem after last nights downtime fiasco & its remenants?I doubt CSM can really do much about this but be aware it could explode in frustartaion as launcher issues become more frequent as they seem to be.Maybe if you could assure your constituants the CSM has told CCP if they don't keep the /bin/evefile.exe option available past expansion day and launchers flub again CCCP should expect a riot?

On SiSi are incursion OTA sites hacking towers now requiring the mini game? CCP Affinity in the forums told me last month they wouldn't BUT in the DEV twitch Q&A last Friday a DEV commented otherwise but no loot would spawn?

Obama's birth certificate *is* a fake, but it really doesn't matter much since he is President of the US and proving the truth won't change that fact. I know someone who was working at the hospital where/when Obama was born. But, the idea that someone has to be a natural-born US citizen to run is idiotic, anyways.

9/11 was not an inside job, but the US intelligence agencies did know it was going to happen, more than 24 hours before. Certain preparations were in place to preemptively deal with the situation, but were never enacted, due to failure by the Bush Administration to commit. This failure to commit was due to concerns about possible political fallout, from exposing such a major terrorist plot in the US. In other words, the Republicans were still talking about how to spin it, when the planes crashed into the towers. The Democrats would have probably done the same thing.

No alien vessel crashed at Roswell. The story was a cover-up for a classified US military project - which was not a surveillance project, btw. The actual project involved early tests on long range atomic bomb deployment. Needless to say, this isn't something that the US government wanted to talk about in public.

@Anon1024 - you are correct. You are a Dipshit, and it is appropriate that you signed your comment accordingly.

Why should I provide you with any evidence? Are you a representative of the US Government? No, I didn't think so.

In any case, the person to whom I referred has already been interviewed by US officials, with his/her statement included, with others, in a sealed record. The matter is considered, by the US Government, to be closed.

If you want to discover his/her identity, feel free to do your own investigation. Even an idiot like you should be able to compile a short list of suspects. However, following his/her interview with the US Government, s/he will not discuss the matter further, and has declined several monetary offers to come forward publicly.

I, on the other hand, can freely discuss this issue, and others, informally and unofficially, here in the comments section of a personal blog, for the simple reason that no one will believe it anyways. Conspiracy theory and tinfoil hattery makes it so easy to hide the truth in plain sight.

You don't have to provide me evidence to back up your assertions. However don't expect your arguments from authority to be taken seriously. Stating that they have been interviewed by US officials lends no credence to your initial fallacious assertion.

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